The other day, I grabbed my iPod to listen to some music in the car and this is what I saw. I have never seen this before on any of the iPods I have owned, and I had never seen or heard of this problem on web forums, etc. This came as a shocker to me because 1) I wanted to listen to music and I couldn’t; 2) I didn’t know the iPod had an internal diagnostic test system.

The menus were completely accessible and I could go from one sectino to another. Unfortunately, when I pushed the button that said “accessorize test”, the iPod froze and I had to wait until the battery died to use my iPod again. Also, the whole time that this menu sequence was up on my iPod, I tried every way possible to get back to the regular iPod OS and none of it worked. I even tried to reset it and it was non responsive in terms of getting me back to the regular iPod screen.

There were lots of stuff to play with in the menus as well, like adjusting the LCD backlight percentage and various things you could do to the flash memory as well as the physical disk drive memory.

At the top, as you can see, it also said “SRV Mar 01 2006″ which I took to mean that the iPod was serviced on March 1, 2006. That’s just my guess and I could be wrong about it.

Anybody seen this too or know of anybody who has had this happen to their iPod? I’ll ask around to see.

See the rest of the weird iPod error screen set here.

UPDATED BELOW!

Turns out that these “error” screens are part of the iPod diagnostic system within the iPod.
I’ve posted this before, but I never thought about looking at it to check. You can graphically see the hidden iPod commands here.
Here are the instructions to get your iPod to these diagnostic screens. It works! :)
Thanks Mike for helping me find these answers. I wasn’t sure what to search for at all. But you nailed it.